Monday, March 30, 2009

Mike MacDougal impressing White Sox coaches

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/whitesox/chi-30-white-sox-bits-chicago-mar30,0,6651533.story

The title of this story is a little misleading. The article is actually just a few small tidbit stories, instead of one story about Mike MacDougal. However, there was no way to tell this from the title.

Other than the title, the stories were pretty informative. They were short, but to the point, and gave the reader the important information that a casual reader would want.

The first small story about Mike MacDougal does a good job of explaining how MacDougal is impressing the coaches (as the headline implies) and why he is forcing the coaches into the difficult decision of whether or not he should make the team. It does a good job of mentioning the team's different options, and then gives the information for the reader to draw their own conclusions about the situation.

The second story is about the Danks brothers and them playing together in the same game for the first time since High School. However, there isn't anything to this story. Its interesting, as this isn't something that doesn't happen very often, but nothing of significance will come from this. It may be worth mentioning, but not at this point. It may have been worth a mention at the very end.

The last story is about the White Sox cutting down their rosters to 25 guys. The article doesn't mention why 25 is a significant number though, so a reader who doesn't know would not understand the importance of these decisions. It does, however, name the players that are in danger of being cut, as well as some other guys who are pretty secure in not being cut.

Overall, the story accomplishes the goals of giving the reader information in a quick and easy to read format that doesn't require much time to read. The reader can get the important info from the stories and move on. However, a reader looking for more information on some of these topics would most likely be disappointed and may have to go to another news source for what they want.

4 comments:

  1. This article was really easy to read, and the small bites keep your attention. If you weren't interested in MacDougal, though, you might not know that it contains some other information. Overall it was straightforward, but the last sentence was a little confusing I thought. He talks about Wise and Anderson who are outfielders and then just calls Miller and Betemit "reserves." It's unclear that they're infielders I thought, but the audience that the article is aimed at probably already knows that.

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  2. I agree with the easy-to-read comment. I like that not too much time is spent on any topic.

    As far as the title goes, I think that it happens that way a lot in sports writing. I noticed in the local paper at home that the title could relate to a very specific event in sports but the article included a round-up of everything that happened in that particular sport the previous day. So is it a given that there will be more to the article? Or should newspapers make it more clear that more information is being covered? I guess the true sports enthusiasts know that there's more to be found in that article and will probably read it anyway. It's an interesting observation you've made, though.

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  3. I think you guys pointed out something that I have definitely noticed in reading these articles: that a lot of them would be really confusing to someone who wasn't familiar with sports. A lot of these articles either don't explain things very well or use jargon. I guess they are assuming that the reader is familiar with sports, and thats why they are reading the article, but it seems like they might be able to gain some more readers if they were willing to explain things a little better and make it easier to understand for someone who might not be familiar with what is going on.

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  4. Other than maybe the earned run average, I still think the outside observer would be able to follow along. I'm not a sports fan, and I think I understood everything in that article.

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